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The Politics of Hope and The Bitter Heritage brings together two important books that bracket the tempestuous politics of 1960s America. In The Politics of Hope, which historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published in 1963 while serving as a special assistant to President Kennedy, Schlesinger defines the liberalism that characterized the Kennedy administration and the optimistic early Sixties. In lively and incisive essays, most of them written between 1956 and 1960, on topics such as the basic differences underlying liberal and conservative politics, the writing of history, and the experience of Communist countries, Schlesinger emphasizes the liberal thinker's responsibility to abide by goals rather than dogma, to learn from history, and to look to the future.

Four years later, following Kennedy's assassination and the escalation of America's involvement in Vietnam, Schlesinger's tone changes. In The Bitter Heritage, a brief but penetrating appraisal of the "war that nobody wanted," he recounts America's entry into Vietnam, the history of the war, and its policy implications. The Bitter Heritage concludes with an eloquent and sobering assessment of the war's threat to American democracy and a reflection on the lessons or legacies of the Vietman conflict.

With a new foreword by Sean Wilentz, the James Madison Library edition of The Politics of Hope and The Bitter Heritage situates liberalism in the convulsive 1960s--and illuminates the challenges that still face liberalism today.

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Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007), was one of the world's most distinguished historians and political commentators. He was professor of history at Harvard from 1946 until 1961, when President Kennedy appointed him special assistant for Latin American affairs. In 1966, he began teaching at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and in 1994 he became an emeritus professor there. His many books include "The Age of Jackson" and "A Thousand Days", both of which received the Pulitzer Prize.

A good many of the pieces that follow were written by an American liberal in the United States in the 1950's-written, that is, from the viewpoint of Hope in an age of Memory. They were written in the belief that, contrary to the view then held by many Americans and (apparently) by most people outside America, the America of the '50's did not necessarily represent the triumphant culmination ofthe American experiment; that America, as a nation, had not necessarily solved all its problems or achieved all its objectives; that the promise of American life had not found perfect fulfillment in a consensus of togetherness and a rhetoric of moralism and self-congratulation; that the American people would not be satisfied forever with a diet of clichés and pieties; that they could not, from now on, be counted as permanently hostile to style, wit, intellect, innovation, and idealism; that the impulses of Hope, gathering beneath the surface, would soon break out and launch the United States into a new and more entertaining epoch.

I could not believe that my country had ground to a halt because, as an historian, and especially as the son of my father, I was well aware of the existence of a cyclical rhythm in our national affairs. The basic fallacy has always been to suppose that the current state of things represents the essence of the American reality. But our reality has always been dialectic. A generation ago my father traced back the historic alternation between Innovation and Conservatism to the start of the American republic. By this analysis, the '50's, far from expressing a final capitulation of America to the status quo, were rather an entirely predictable decade of Memory after two decades of active and exhausting Hope. So far as the historian was concerned, there was no reason to suppose, because we acquiesced for a season, that acquiescence would ever after be the American way.

The correctness of this cyclical view has been shown, I think, by the long way we have already come in the '60's. We are beginning to recover the qualities which the rest of the world-and many Americans too, some with relief, others with foreboding-imagined that we had forsworn forever. We no longer seem an old nation, tired, complacent and self-righteous. We no longer suppose that our national salvation depends on stopping history in its tracks and freezing the world in its present mold. Our national leadership is young, vigorous, intelligent, civilized, and experimental-and rare in this world in being any of these things. Our mistakes these days tend to be the mistakes of rationality, not the mistakes of complacency.

Self-righteousness has ceased to be the main instrument of our diplomacy. Instead, idealism sends thousands of young Americans to the ends of the world as farmers or teachers or engineers for the Peace Corps. The life of the mind enjoys a new freedom and a new status. There has never been such official interest in and support of the arts. Wit has become respectable; it is even presidential now. Satire has burst out of the basements of San Francisco and Greenwich Village. People feel free to make jokes about anybody or anything. The word "togetherness" has passed from the language. Few would describe American society any longer in last decade's condescending vocabulary of conformism and homogenization.

In short, the older American faith in leadership and diversity and contention and individualism and experiment and irreverence is beginning to reassert itself. We are Sons of Liberty once again; or, at least, we admit this as a legitimate ambition. We have awakened as from a trance; and we have awakened so quickly and sharply that we can hardly remember what it was like when we slumbered. Our complaints now are that we have not made more progress, not that our capability for progress is extinct. The peculiarities of the '50's, some of which are recounted in the pages to follow, have almost the air of a forgotten nightmare.

It is important not to overdo this. Self-congratulation is as dangerous for the party of Hope as for the party of Memory. It would be premature to suppose that we are approaching the millennium-that the day is imminent when all turmoil will be over, when Satan will be cast into the life of fire and brimstone, and mankind will behold a new heaven and a new earth. It would not only be premature; it would be wrong. By American tradition, the party of Hope is humane, skeptical, and pragmatic. It has no dogma, no sense of messianic mission, no belief that mortal man can attain Utopia, no faith that fundamental problems have final solutions. The empiricism of the American party of Hope stands in sharp contrast to the millennialism which still inflames the ideologists, whether of the American right or of the European and Asian left-the notion that a golden age existed in the past, or will exist in the future, which mankind can achieve through the proper combination of incantations and exorcisms.

José Figueres, the Latin American patriot, calls his finca in the Costa Rican uplands "La Lucha Sin Fin"-the struggle without end. Freedom is inseparable from struggle; it is a process, not a conclusion. And freedom, as Brandeis said, is the great developer; it is both the means employed and the end attained. This, I believe, states the essence of the Politics of Hope-this and the understanding that the struggle itself offers not only a better life for others but a measure of fulfillment, even of pleasure, for oneself.

I am indebted to Paul Brooks of Houghton Mifflin for suggesting this book and to Anne Barrett and Helen Phillips for seeing the volume through the press. I am also indebted to my father for continuing counsel and tolerance; and my father and I are both indebted to John F. Kennedy for vindicating the cyclical theory of American politics.

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